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Your Drunk Tweets = Their Science Deets

Well, it's St. Patrick's Day, and we're here to confirm your invasive thoughts that maybe you should totally do a whole bunch of drunk social media posts to tell all of your friends and family and exes and pizza deliverymen how much you love them. What? Why? Because at one point in New York City, it was totally helping science.

We're not talking about the science of mixology, though that counts too. *Burp.*
(Image courtesy scientificamerican.com.)

According to gizmodo.com, a scientific assessment of Twitter posts compiled and analyzed for cocktail-crushing keywords was conducted in and around New York City from January to July of 2014. Researchers from the University of Rochester studied over 11,000 geotagged tweets from NYC and upstate NY's Monroe County to deduce if the authors were typing under the influence.

Gone are the days of many authors being able to make their inebriation seem intelligent.
BTW WE LOVE YOU PAPA HEMINGWAY, PLEASE KEEP HAUNTING OUR DREAMS.
(Image courtesy gstatic.com.)

Words like "beer", "pong", "party", "drunk", "hammered", and presumably "dammmmt i misss yoouuu please call me baccckkkk" were the initial targets of the search. The scientists then outsourced further analysis to Mechanical Turk workers to determine if the tweet was published during the author's drinking hours, which in New York City could basically be whenever (the city that never sleeps is also the city that will skull tallboys on the stoop at 9 AM.)

An algorithm was developed to spot sauce-saturated social-media sayings, but more importantly, social science breakthroughs were made. Study author Nabil Hossain explained, “Our results demonstrate that tweets can provide powerful and fine-grained cues of activities going on in cities."

So, your habits are being tracked by the hooch you haul down. Public health officials value this sort of data, as it can indicate all manner of information regarding certain neighborhoods, from noise levels to addictive tendencies (both of which they could probably have gleaned just by standing outside your local bar while dispensing single cigarettes.) Alcohol policies, outreach, and other elements can then be assessed to possibly help troubled areas.

Oh, and not to freak you out or anything, but MIT's report on the study includes more details on what the researchers sought (like deducing whether you were drinking at home, and where that home may be) and their ambitions for its future (refining data to include age, sex, ethnicity, whether you prefer boozing at bars or baseball parks, etc.)

But hey, risking that invasion of inebriated information was the choice you made when you puked your post up onto Twitter...did you think modern scientists wouldn't use every angle to find out when they can next mack on you (or at least roll around in your data) when you're drunk? Don't be weird about it, calm down. Here, have a beer.

Their research to precisely calibrate your beer goggles will never cease.
(Image courtesy www.viewthevibe.com.)